Branding beauty: 8 print designs we’re obsessed with
From hairdresser business cards to salon gift cards, check out our community’s beautiful designs.
The beauty industry is all about helping people let their identity shine through. So is good design. Expressing a brand’s identity through a set of skillfully picked design elements is the mark of great branding. That’s why branding your beauty business right is vital to giving a sense of your expertise and uniqueness.
From hair stylist business cards to salon gift cards, get inspired with some of our creative community’s most stunning designs for beauty brands.
Four Eyes Design: simply sleek
Four Eyes Design was created with one goal in mind: create great branding that stands out. Laura, 26, is committed to championing the independent businesses from her local area of Middlesbrough, UK. Working with a variety of businesses, she captures the essence of their brand identity while providing a sense of simplicity and understatement, a key element at the core of everything she designs.
For Studio M’s branding, she created a suite of playful designs, from Gift Certificates to Business Cards. “The collaterals just sum up the overall feel of Molly’s hair salon. It’s girly, fun and just completely welcoming.” She created the hair stylist’s business cards with our premium Luxe paper, and used long matte Postcards and Flyers for the salon’s gift cards and their price list. “I love that we chose subtlety for the cards and didn’t go all singing all dancing with gloss and foil, as gorgeous as these special touches are as I always say – simplicity is key.”
The Logo Page: the golden ticket
Ellen and Alex, the talented twins behind The Logo Page, specialize in branding and (great) logo design. Their numerous clients in the hair & cosmetics industry are a testament to their incredible instinct for branding beauty.
For PS Hair Extensions’s vouchers, the duo of designers used Super Postcards and a Gold Foil finish to give a classy and luxurious touch. With a beautiful dusty pink shade to make the gold finish stand out, their retro-inspired ticket design gives the gift vouchers an extra-special, sophisticated feel. “The design was inspired by the high-end beauty industry but with a fun, young and modern twist of the vintage admission ticket.”
Myan Duong: brows first
Austin-based designer Myan Duong is nothing if not multifaceted. An associate experience director by day, she doesn’t stop creating when the evening comes. What she loves? Bringing ideas to life. Handmade jewelry maker, Pinterest influencer, graphic designer… Beauty branding is just one of her many talents. Just like Myan, brow specialists Bespoke Co-op are a versatile business. When they’re not performing micro blading, tattooing, tinting, waxing or laminating brows, they’re training the next generation of brow experts in their Houston beauty salon.
“Client experience is of our utmost priority. We have a lot of regular brow waxing clients, and to express how much we value them, we had Brow Waxing Loyalty Punch Cards created by our graphic designer and friend, [Myan Duong].” For these minimalist Loyalty Cards, space was of the essence. Playing with a mix of modern serif and sans serif fonts on a warm brown background, the cards reflect flawlessly the mission of the salon – perfectly shaped, perfectly colored eyebrows. “We love how crisp and readable the tiny numbers and letters come out. The smoothness is also our favorite thing about these cards. They are fun to touch and are super easy to write on as well. “
Lucy’s Logos: goldilocks 2.0
British creative studio Lucy’s Logos focuses on logo design and brand identity. Lucy is a big hit with beauty, fashion and lifestyle brands alike, from nail bars to pet apparel and candy shops. Her unique designs convey a strong sense of brand identity, and make great – and highly instagrammable – conversation starters.
For hair & makeup stylist Blondy, the design whizz embraced the reference with a Gold Foil finish that would make goldilocks green with envy. “Foil is the perfect little addition to any small print to give it that extra luxury feel.” She chose a sandy blond background to highlight the bold, stencil-like gold font on the hairdresser’s Business Cards, another clever reminder of Blondy’s specialty.
Social Collective Agency: eye candy
Based in Naples, the Social Collective Agency specializes in all-things content, from social media management to website design and brand strategy. Whether she goes for minimalist aesthetics and muted palettes or bright colors and playful compositions, founder Giorgia thrives on telling brands’ stories through design.
For My Lash Lounge, she used MOO’s MiniCards as lovely mini gift cards. Playing with a range of soft shades, Giorgia used white space to highlight the logo in a subtle yet eye-catching way. But there’s more: the brand took gift vouchers to the next level with irresistible packaging. Wrapped in a transparent, branded bauble and decorated with a satin bow, the MiniCards sit amongst petals and chocolates for an extra-special treat.
Blush by Ella: pretty in (dusty) pink
British makeup artist Ella Walters is the brains (and hands) behind Blush by Ella – but the beautician is not just great at making humans look pretty. The multitalented MUA also designed her very own Business Cards. Cosmetology is just the tip of the iceberg! “I really fell in love with branding last year and I’ve noticed how much difference it’s made to my business. Working in such a competitive industry, it really is the little things that make people remember you, and I never thought a business card could so perfectly showcase my business and its vibe.”
Ella approached her beauty Business Card design like she would do a makeup gig. Combining a beautiful dusty pink background with an elegant Gold Foil finish, she painted her brand story in just a few simple strokes. “When potential clients come across your business cards at bridal fairs, local coffee shops, or steal them from their friends after a recommendation, your cards introduce your business before you get the chance to. So I opted for all of the glam because that’s exactly what my business is all about! And I mean, who isn’t obsessed with Gold Foil?”
Beth’s Branding Co: sky high
Founder of Beth’s Branding Co Beth Stefanczyk is committed to designing unique branding that makes businesses look the part – many of which happen to be promising beauty brands. From business cards for beauty salons to hairdresser stamp cards, Beth sees every project as an opportunity to let brands shine through.
For The Skin Genie, she designed a range of marketing materials to showcase the business’ fresh branding with Square Business Cards, Round Stickers and Gift Certificates. Combining bright white and a light sky blue, the branding conveys a sense of trust and expertise, which the illustrated icon and the curved, swirly font complement nicely, reflecting the playfulness of the brand.
Beth’s Branding Co: minimalist glory
When it comes to beauty, if Business Cards are important, price lists are an absolute must-have. For The Nail Room by Danae, Beth used long Postcards to print her treatment list design. She achieved the perfect balance between minimalism and warmth by marrying a muted color palette and modern sans serif type to a lovely handwritten font.
Feeling inspired? Get your brand out there with MOO’s range of custom marketing materials.
Óura is a small lifestyle studio offering ethical and environmentally-friendly homeware such as candles, balms and soaps. Hard to believe that this impeccable branding is the work of one woman, Ezrea Cartier, but the driven young Londoner has more than one trick up her sleeve. Focused on providing an unforgettable experience on a limited budget, she put together a promotion strategy that would make the biggest brands green with envy.
We met Ezrea to talk about her ethos, her journey to entrepreneurship and how she developed Óura’s fresh branding and best-in-class promotion strategy.
Tell us a bit more about yourself. How did your journey lead you to the world of natural lifestyle products and cosmetics?
I’m Ezrea, I’m 25 and I’m from East London, UK. I don’t have a conventional journey into starting a business. I grew up in a household that has always had a strong bond with animals and cruelty-free ethics. That, coupled with the fact that my sister and I always had troubles finding brands we really liked due to our sensitive skin, led us to more simple and natural ingredients.
My mother has always been entrepreneurial and supportive of everything I’ve wanted to do, and I’ve always had an independent and DIY ethic. So, when the idea to start a business came to me, I knew instantly that I wanted to focus on lifestyle and cosmetic products.
How did you end up launching your own brand, Óura?
In March 2020, the lockdown had just started and I found myself on furlough with a lot of free time to explore new hobbies. I decided to try and make some simple candles. I had been tinkering with starting up a small business on the side of my full-time job, and knew it was going to be something related to lifestyle, as I could never find anything that really matched my aesthetics.
One morning, it all clicked and I thought I’d try it out. I felt like there was a small gap in the candle market for something that was slightly different from the usual candle brands, and I could see how I was going to build Óura out of this.
Did you face any obstacles creating your own brand?
The biggest challenges are challenges we still have today with perfecting the recipes and making sure the candles meet our expectations. One of the earliest challenges was what to do with the candles that weren’t quite good enough. As a small business this was precious wasted ingredients and an extra cost we needed to account for. We quickly came up with a solution: The “Ugly Duckling” versions of our products allowed us to still sell these products by being upfront with our customers. It also perfectly married up with our sustainable ethos as a brand.
The other on-going obstacle with creating your own business is finding enough room for everything! There’s never enough room to produce a batch in our kitchen and even less room to stock all the finished products.
What do you find the most rewarding and the most challenging about being a one-woman business?
The most rewarding thing is seeing the final product boxed up, labeled and completed. I still enjoy putting all the labels on the boxes myself and seeing the products stack up in our makeshift storage. Seeing people enjoy the products and take an interest in the brand is very surreal – so is being asked to do interviews for companies like MOO! We have also been approached by a handful of department stores about stocking, although lockdown has thrown a few spanners in the works on that front. It makes us feel like we’re doing something right.
The most challenging is the doubt that sometimes creeps in when designing a new product or reaching out with press releases. Being a one-woman band is also pretty challenging, wearing the many hats of running a small business (especially now!): being the accountant, the support team, the marketer, producing the candles, maintaining social media… It can all get fairly exhausting!
You managed to make your visual identity both creative and consistent. Did you have any experience of branding before creating your own business?
Thank you! I had no experience with branding at all but I knew what I didn’t like and what I thought would feel like Óura. For this, I turned to my partner, who runs the design studio Michael Arnold Studio, to produce the branding, packaging and overall experience of the products. It was a really intensive process where the final idea originated from a “design accident” that evolved into something we both knew was the right route. We have received a number of compliments on our packaging and features on design sites and we’re looking to keep bucking the trend with our branding to deliver something that we couldn’t find anywhere when we started.
What do you want to convey with Óura’s fresh branding?
That you can have high quality products that aren’t stuffy and overly pretentious. Óura is as much about not taking ourselves too seriously as it is about beautiful, luxury, cruelty-free products.
When it comes to inspiration, what are your top 3 aspirational brands?
I love Neal’s Yard for their sustainable ethics as well the quality of their products; Jo Malone for their aesthetics and eponymous founder – an inspiration for all one-woman business owners –, and finally Yankee Candle for their range of experimental scents.
How did you approach your promotion strategy?
We knew early on that we would not be able to compete with the big brands in terms of price and marketing budgets, so we had to create an experience with our products that couldn’t be easily forgotten… on our shoe-string budget!
A big part of this were products from MOO that allowed us to get affordable promotional materials and finishing touches without compromising on quality. We also knew that our best shot was creating an ‘Instagram-able’ product and packaging, which fed into our strategy of spending time on the overall experience.
How do you use MOO to get the word out about your brand?
We have worked with MOO to create Stickers, Postcards, Business Cards and Gold Foil cards. We use our stickers obsessively on everything we ship out and our Gold Foil cards go to customers that make large orders or to PR teams… Everybody loves them!
Are you working on any exciting new products that you can tell us about?
We’re looking into adding some new fragrances into the mix and continue to focus on un-fussy products. We’re also looking to do a lot of pop-ups this year and are in touch with a major department store about putting one together with them. For those who can’t wait, we recently released our new line of Minis that we will be developing further in 2021.
Do you have any advice for people trying to create their own brand?
It sounds cliché, but just start it! You have to be bold with it – you can’t pursue your dream in secret and hope none of your friends or family see it in case you fail. You just have to do it because it could all be worth it.
Look at your competitors and see what you would do differently. What don’t you like about them? What are they missing? Can you add something new, not necessarily groundbreaking, but different to the mix? What ethics drive you when buying and can you introduce this in your brand?
Get the word out about your brand and give your clients the ultimate customer experience with Stickers and Postcards.
CEO, manager, HR, receptionist… Having your own business often means wearing many hats. When there aren’t enough hours in the day, try these time management tips to make multitasking easier.
Plan your week ahead
Planning your week is the key to good time management – whether you’re a one-person business working from home, or a growing start-up. Creating a schedule for your week allows you to plan ahead and structure your time so that you can prioritize and re-prioritize tasks – all while cutting down on your stress levels, to boot.
Small business time management can be tricky, so start with the essentials. Deadlines and urgent jobs should define how you organize tasks across your week. For example, if you’ve got a big deliverable on Thursday, make the days leading up to it production days, and leave non-urgent but important tasks like admin and meetings for Friday. Be ready to reorganize your schedule if priorities suddenly change, too. Think of it as a ‘Plan A’ or a work in progress rather than something set in stone.
1. Group tasks by project or type
One of the most effective time management strategies when it comes to planning your week is to group tasks. It can be helpful to arrange similar or related activities together on a single day, so that you’re not hopping from one thing to another, and can focus on the specific goals you need to achieve.
For example, you might dedicate a whole day to working on marketing tasks like social media and writing your newsletter, as the tasks will relate to each other and you can apply your creative flow to several things at once. Keep in mind this time management approach works for methodical jobs too. You might spend an afternoon doing invoices, which will be quicker in a batch because the same steps are repeated and you’ll get faster as you go along.
2. Create a day-by-day schedule
A proper structure is the backbone of a planned week, and there are lots of ready-made templates available online that you can download and fill in to itemize your days. These can work for individuals or whole teams. A good template should give equal weight to each day, and have enough space to write a few words about each task or target – not too much though, or it just becomes cluttered.
If you’re a one-person business and you like to plan on paper, you could start getting organized with a Notebook to keep track of your week and make sure your schedule is always at hand.
3. Plan for distraction
It’s not realistic to plan productivity and focus for every hour of every day, so don’t set your business’ time management strategy up to fail. The best time management systems are all about balance! Instead, expect to be distracted, disrupted and confronted by unexpected challenges and opportunities. When you’re planning for the week ahead, add ‘interruption time’ – a proportion of the day when you don’t expect to spend every moment getting work done.
So although your office hours might be 9 til 5 with an hour for lunch, you can realistically deduct an hour from the total. Don’t think of that as wasted time, however – what feels like a frustrating delay will help you refresh your mind and might even be the moment inspiration strikes.
4. Dive into deep work
The idea of deep work is that you’re consciously focusing on your task and training your attention away from distractions. To achieve that, you need to be able to carve out time when you’ll be free of meetings and other commitments, able to focus fully on one task.
Put time for deep work into your weekly schedule, and support your intentions by blocking this time off from distractions and interruptions. A ‘do not disturb’ sign and an email auto-reply are a good start to apply this time management strategy.
Organize your day’s work
What does a typical workday look like for small business owners? A common answer is that there is no typical day – various and exciting activities are a hallmark of life as an entrepreneur. That doesn’t mean you can’t organize your time, however. A daily plan is valuable even if it changes, as it can help you keep track of priorities, deadlines and your progress on longer-term goals. As with your weekly approach, the trick is to have a fluid schedule that can flex and adapt to new things, rather than a rigid timetable.
Here are a few more time management tips to help you plan how to spend your day.
1. Keep priorities in check with a to-do list
A business time management classic, the to-do is a list of the things you want or need to get done within your day, organized according to priority. The most urgent and important things should be at the top, and less important or postponable things towards the bottom. But keep in mind, a long to-do list will just cause you unnecessary stress. Some experts recommend keeping a daily to-do list down to 6 items, and others advise as few as 3.
To keep track of what you accomplish during the day, use a checklist and tick off what you’ve completed as you go along. You can even make your very own tailor-made to-do list in your MOO Notebook.
2. Target your efforts with time-blocking
Time blocking is a time management technique that many small business owners find useful. It’s the practice of chunking out your work into dedicated sections of time – the opposite of multitasking, where attention is spread inefficiently across multiple activities at once. The idea is that by focusing on one thing at a time, you can dedicate attention and energy to each task and get it done more quickly and to a higher standard. A great way to approach work if you’re wondering how to manage time as a business owner.
To time-block your day, you need to schedule the hours you have available and assign them to items in your to-do list. For effective time management, you won’t necessarily do the most important thing on the list first thing in the morning. Instead, you should assign your top task to the part of the day when you know you’ll be most productive. If you’re a morning person, that could be first thing. If you’re a night-owl, late afternoon might be when you really hit your stride.
If you tend to feel sleepy after lunch – most of us do –, spend that time doing necessary but low-effort things like paperwork or timesheets.
3. Separate daily and weekly planning
If you’re wondering how to manage time in business, separate daily from weekly objectives. This is a good habit to start effective time management. It’s important to know the difference between a daily and weekly schedule, as each one is valuable to your business in its own way. Your daily schedule will include ‘business as usual’ goals like answering emails and phone calls, attending daily team stand-ups and other routine tasks. They take up time during your day and need to be accounted for, but you don’t need to put them on a weekly planner.
Your weekly schedule gives you a wider view of your work life and allows you to manage tasks across the week. What happens in your daily schedule can impact the weekly one – for example if you need to roll a task over from one day to another because it took longer than planned to achieve.
3 productivity tips for good time management
We’ve all had those days where we look up at 4pm and say ‘where did the time go? I’ve got deadlines approaching!’ To keep those moments to a minimum, here are some ways to establish good time management.
1. Recognize your distractors
We’re all prone to getting side-tracked from our goals, and thanks to the digital distractions of modern life, staying focused is more challenging than ever. Notice the things that claim your attention most often. It could be having too many interesting browser tabs open on your screen, so that you drift off-task and start reading a blog or news story. Or it may be that your phone is taking your mind off work by flashing or vibrating each time you get a message in a group chat.
Once you’ve spotted the things that are repeatedly stealing your attention, you can take steps to eliminate them until you accomplish your task. For effective time management, throw your phone in a drawer, close every tab except the one you need for your work task, or put on headphones if you’re tempted to spend time chatting. Over time, good habits like these will become automatic.
2. Be wary of trying to do too much at once
It’s one of the most important time management tips for business owners to avoid burnout. If the things cutting your productivity down are less to do with losing focus and more to do with interruption, you might be spreading yourself too thin. It’s common for people heading up growing businesses to have a lot of competing demands on their time. Being busy is good, but it’s important to be aware that you could reach a point where you’re tiring yourself out but not achieving the results to justify it.
Remind yourself to notice the difference between being stressed and busy and being highly productive. A good time management system should help you relieve stress and make things more…manageable. Look at what you achieved as well as how hard you’ve worked, and make sure you’re getting the positive outcomes you deserve for your effort. Managing a small business can be incredibly stressful. Resolving to work smarter rather than harder can also make you feel more in control and is better for your mental health.
3. Take time to recharge
On a similar note, it’s true that productivity requires rest as well as hard work. It’s an crucial part of time management for business owners as it’s key to protect your mental health. If your schedule involves a few hours work and several periods of rest, you’re in company with some of the greatest achievers in history. Charles Darwin, for example, required an afternoon nap and took leisurely walks outdoors during a work day. It proved an effective time management technique!
Manage your time spent in front of a screen – you should be taking a screen break of five or ten minutes every hour, according to the UK Government’s Health and Safety Executive. Little and often is the best way to take breaks, as this will help you feel more refreshed. Some periods of deliberate rest during your work schedule will give you the time and space to reflect on your goals, develop ideas and allow your brain to make new connections between things you’ve learned or observed. Don’t be afraid to take your foot off the gas – you could accomplish great things on a day when you thought you were chilling out doing nothing.
How to boost your efficiency
What is efficiency?
Isn’t efficiency the same thing as productivity? In fact, they’re very different, and can even work against each other at times. To put it simply:
- Productivity is about the volume of work you produce, and efficiency is about the quality of that work. So if your company makes cookies, your productivity is the number of items you can bake in a day.
- Efficiency is how delicious they are when your customer bites into them, how much energy it took to bake them, or how much you had to spend on ingredients to get great results.
It probably goes without saying that productivity and efficiency are both essential for any business, and they can have a strong impact on one another. The idea of productive efficiency is used in some businesses, meaning that the two things are measured at once. In these scenarios the managers are measuring the total number of products completed in a given time, and deducting inefficient products from that total. So if some products fall below a certain quality threshold, they’re not counted.
This business time management tip is easiest to understand in a manufacturing situation, where a business has physical products that can pass or fail. But it can apply on a small scale too, including companies that provide services rather than products. The key to measuring efficiency this way is to define a quality standard that you want to stick to, whether it’s customer satisfaction, timely delivery or reviews and ratings. If your units of work (be it projects, products or something else) don’t meet the standard, they’re ignored.
How can I be more efficient?
Improving efficiency is a strategic job that often means slowing down and taking a step back from your work. If you’re interested in making efficiency your superpower, start looking at the way you’re doing things and seeing where you can make improvements to your methods, habits and behaviours to get better results.
One example that applies to entrepreneurs in all walks of life is sleep. Getting a solid 8 or 9 hours sleep every night can improve your concentration, motivation, mood and ability to learn. If you’re a one-person business, prioritizing sleep is a way of optimizing your most valuable resource – yourself. You can make your brain more efficient by giving it enough sleep, so that the quality of the work you do is high, it takes fewer hours, and you have more time for your passion projects.
From a business time management perspective, your goals will be to achieve the best quality work you can within your deadlines – and with any luck, upping your productivity at the same time. Here are some ways you can boost efficiency in a small business:
1. Avoid multitasking
It might feel necessary, but resist the urge to hop between multiple activities during the working day as much as possible. It takes time to refocus on a task when you switch to and from it, so try to chunk work into organized blocks as much as you can. Time-blocking wins again!
2. Optimize your environment
Make sure your workspace is geared for focus by minimizing distractions, noise and stress. Have your workstation – or workstations – set up for comfortable, sustainable posture and freedom of movement. Organize people, tools and materials physically in your workspace so that it’s easy to get tasks done without rearranging everything and everyone. It’s all about saving time and effort.
3. Delegate tasks to others
If you manage a team, use them wisely. Chances are, you don’t actually need to be in every single meeting! Be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses as well as theirs, so you can assign tasks that take up too much of your time to someone who can do them faster. This applies to specialism and experience too. If you have a statistics whiz on your team, they’re the person who should be tackling your website analytics, not the business owner whose time is better spent on leadership strategy or creative development. Time management in business requires assigning the right people to the right jobs. If you work alone, consider hiring a freelancer or partnering with someone who could help lighten your workload and bring new skills to the table.
4. Use technology to automate
Automating routine tasks will do wonders for your work life. Using chatbots to answer customer service queries, or employing software to handle bookings and sales, is a great time-saver for busy humans.
Hopefully our time management tips will help you to make the most of your precious work hours. Ready to make your weekly schedule? Treat yourself to a beautiful new Notebook for all your creative projects and daily to-dos.
Your menu is a window into your restaurant. More than just a list of your food and drinks, it’s a unique opportunity to give customers a taste of your offer and create a full brand experience. A beautiful, attractive AND practical menu design is key to stand head and shoulders above the rest – and make customers come back for more.
Stand out from the crowd and showcase your signature dishes in style with our 4 best menu design tips to create mouth-watering drink lists and food menus.
Logic is key
Before you think about palettes, fonts and other ways to create a cool menu design, think about the user experience. Your objective here is to make it easy for clients to familiarize themselves with your offer and make a choice – preferably ordering everything on the menu. If your design is a work of art but customers can’t find what they’re looking for, you might as well frame your masterpiece on the wall and start over.
Start off by listing everything on the menu, and sort the items into different categories. Do you need a separate menu for drinks? Could you create a whole section for vegan dishes? Think logically, based on the customer experience. You can then think about the order of your sections. For example, customers are likely to order starters and sharing platters before mains and desserts. A San Francisco University study indicates customers tend to read food menus like a book, starting from the top left corner.
Keep it simple
Albert Einstein phrased it well: “out of clutter, find simplicity.” This principle applies perfectly to food menu design – and to life in general. Once you’ve organized the structure of information, making it clear and easy to understand is essential to make your menu attractive to customers.
Choose fonts and colors keeping readability in mind – again, a beautiful design is no use if you can’t make sense of it. Avoid intricate cursive fonts or ultra thin types, and play with contrasts and complementary colors to make your menu pop. Using three colors maximum is usually a good rule of thumb when designing marketing materials. If you need more, try using darker or lighter variations of your palette.
Keep your eyes on the prize! When creating your restaurant’s menu design, consider using simple lines and boxes to separate sections or highlight the items you want to draw attention to. The simpler it is to find your signature dishes or drinks, the more likely your customers are to order them.
Stay consistent
We’ll never say it enough. Consistency is key! Good branding is like a signature: it should be unique and instantly recognizable. If your food or drink menu design is using different fonts and colors than the rest of your marketing materials – both physical and digital – you might confuse your customers (and we don’t want that). Good branding is essential to convey a sense of who you are as a business, and a seamless brand experience sends your customers a positive message. It allows them to get a clear idea of your brand identity, and helps build trust that they’ll receive a reliable, quality service from you. Plus, it makes coming up with a cool menu design much easier.
To ensure you build a strong, consistent brand from A to Z, try to use similar fonts and colors in your online and offline communications – and don’t forget your logo. If you’re not happy with your current brand identity, work out if it’s time for you to rebrand with our expert tips.
Think outside the box
Don’t be afraid of doing things a little differently. Why restrain yourself to a classic menu design idea when so many shapes, sizes, and materials are at your disposal? Going for an original – and relevant – format guarantees you’ll create an eye-catching menu design your customers won’t soon forget. Whether you go for Flyers, Postcards, or even Stickers, we have plenty of shapes and sizes for you to choose from. Sky’s the limit.
Looking for inspiration? Nick Bampton’s clever menu design idea is a great example of smart, out-of-the-box design. For his client Pappe Bar & Café, he addressed the unique design challenge arising from new COVID-19 rules in Germany. Preventing the use of traditional table menus, the new rules forced Nick to get extra creative when imagining the bar and café’s menu design for their summer drinks. His client needed a menu that was fixed to the tables and could be cleaned and disinfected easily and effectively. Unable to go for a traditional menu card design, Nick came up with an ingenious design solution to their problem. Using MOO’s Rectangular Stickers, he created six unique “menu stickers”, inspired by the reversible nature of playing cards, featuring diametric text and artwork that is viewable from both sides of the table – simple, clear and effective.
Create a mouth-watering restaurant menu design with MOO Flyers, Postcards or Stickers.
Ready to take the leap? If top freelancers say they’re happier and earn more, the real challenges are elsewhere. Finding clients and having a full pipeline of work is often the main obstacle keeping aspiring freelancers from pursuing their dream.
So, how to get started? Before you dive into the solo entrepreneur life, here are 5 expert freelancing tips to start a successful career as a freelancer.
1. Update your portfolio
You’ve done great work, now show it off! When you go into the world of freelance and you’re pitching your services, make sure your portfolio reflects the work that you want to do. Don’t be afraid to make a mock project for your dream company if you don’t have any experience working in that specific field. It could get you your first freelance gig!
The second rule of a good portfolio is to prioritize quality over quantity. Don’t be discouraged if you only have 1 or 2 projects under your belt. When it comes to your portfolio, having quality work that you’re proud of should be the focus rather than putting everything you’ve ever done on display.
2. Do research on your rate
Don’t blindly set a rate for your services, and never undersell yourself. It’s essential to set strong foundations for your career as a freelancer. Survey fellow freelancers. Read blogs of freelancers with a similar skillset. Meet other freelancers and learn from their experiences through online communities like Domino The Bonsai Rate Explorer. It’s a great resource to start with to make sure you’re charging what you’re worth. Make sure you know you are valuing yourself properly before you go out and pitch your services.
3. Be discoverable
Discoverability is key to a successful freelance career. Make it easy for people to learn more about you by creating a website or online portfolio, create bespoke social media accounts to share your best pieces and use Business Cards and Postcards to showcase examples of your work along with your details.
You can also create an about.me page and including it in your email signature and Twitter bio. This way, when someone comes across your social media sites or you send a cold-email, someone can meet you and see all of your awesome work.
4. Get the word out
And we mean EVERYONE. This is one of the most important freelancing tips for beginners. Your best resource when it comes to finding your first freelance gig is your network. When you decide to make the plunge into the world of freelancing, tell all your friends, colleagues and family! Tweet it out, send a mass email, post it to your Instagram and LinkedIn – do it all so that everyone knows you’re looking for freelance work. Don’t be shy! Your next freelancing project could be just around the corner.
5. Join a community
A successful freelance career is all about networking. To increase the chances of you finding new clients, put yourself out there! Join social media groups and participate in chats based on your skillset, attend online networking events and reach out to your dream clients directly. Let them know you just entered the game!
MOO has teamed up with about.me to bring you these freelancing tips. On about.me, you can create a page and get one link to present who you are and what you do. It’s made for freelancers, entrepreneurs, and side-hustlers looking to grow their audience or find new clients. With your personalized domain, you can centralize your online presence and showcase everything you do, from your work to your passions. Get started today.
Ready to start your new career as a freelancer? Showcase your portfolio in style and get the word out with Business Cards and Postcards.
Concerned about the number of Londoners experiencing feelings of isolation, Janice Johnson decided to address the elephant in the room with a storytelling supper club, reconnecting the city through good food and true stories.
We met Janice to talk about her innovative supper club that fights loneliness and stigma, and how she adapted her concept in a time of pandemic and greater social isolation.
Tell us about yourself and your background as an activist and storyteller.
I am a facilitator, coach and social learning experience designer. I work with individuals and organizations to build trust, resolve conflict and identify the unspoken roots of problems that prevent true belonging, connection and meaningful collaboration.
I’ve always loved stories, especially real, honest human experiences told from the heart. Our stories are the thing all of us have in common. For better or worse they’re all around us: newspapers, magazines, conversations overheard on buses and trains. But when it comes to the tough stuff, the stories that are difficult to tell, we tend to try and hide those away instead of saying how we really feel. I’ve felt like that myself and, as a coach, I’ve worked with lots of clients who’ve felt that way too, so I decided to try and work to change that.
Our stories are the thing all of us have in common.
Now, my work is all about tackling loneliness and social isolation. It’s a massive problem, not just in the UK, but globally. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, it was called a “silent epidemic” and one of the most major public health crises of our generation. I’m hugely passionate about raising awareness about loneliness and isolation because too many people assume it’s something that just affects older people, when it really isn’t at all. Loneliness affects 1 in 3 people and can happen at any point in their lifetime. So if you’re in a room of 12 people, at least four of them are lonely – and loneliness comes with serious health risks.
Can you tell us more about your supper club, Eating With Elephants? How did you come up with the idea?
I was concerned about how many people – not just my coaching clients – were experiencing loneliness because of the shame and fear they felt about their experiences. They’re emotions that all of us have about experiences we shouldn’t be ashamed of, but because they’re so stigmatized, we’re too scared to talk about them and we push them to the back of our minds. I wanted to do something to change things.
So I did a year-long research project into how stories could create a pathway to connection by enabling people to talk about the things that they were trying to hide. It was fascinating. I learned so much about traditional storytelling cultures, ancient storytelling practices and modern methods of creating connection. Food and comfort were a big part of that. I put that research together with my own background and developed Eating With Elephants.
Life isn’t always Instagram-perfect, but we’re in it together because we all have our elephants in the room.
The concept? A storytelling supper club reconnecting the loneliest city in the world through good food and true stories. A group of strangers meet over dinner and each tell a story about their “elephant in the room”. They’re uncomfortable themes to talk about like guilt, shame or jealousy, but the comfortable environment makes it easier to share how you feel. We recreate the magical atmosphere that you get from telling stories around a campfire, with candlelight and a meal shared family-style around a big round dinner table.
By the end of the night, the group of people who come along leave feeling less like strangers and more like friends. It’s always unique. You can share, listen, laugh, cry, vent, learn and connect as each person tells their story. You’ll leave knowing that life isn’t always Instagram-perfect, but we’re in it together because we all have our elephants in the room.
What was the biggest challenge you encountered when bringing your concept to life?
The concept wasn’t something that I had come across anywhere else, so trying to find examples of similar organizations or projects that I could learn from was difficult. I had to do a lot of searching before I found peers working on similar topics that I could talk to. I met some great people whose advice was invaluable and helped me build my project.
Once I’d developed my idea a bit more, I wanted to test it out in real life. I really believed in the concept, but I had no idea whether or not anyone else would. It was really hard work to get pilot dinners up and running. I did everything by word of mouth at first, getting a few people together at home or in a restaurant where I wouldn’t have huge venue hire costs. It was only once I had tested it fully and changed some things that needed to work better that I could focus on finding a long-term home for Eating With Elephants.
How do you think storytelling can help fight loneliness and stigma?
Loneliness and isolation are some of the biggest issues faced by our generation. We’re more technologically connected, but – even before the pandemic – we’ve been growing more socially disconnected than ever before. Social media creates a massive barrier to connection. We’re constantly bombarded with images of “perfection”. When you look around and everyone seems to be living their best life 24/7, you feel like you have to put on a front. It’s rare to see people being authentic about how they really feel. It’s not part of UK culture to be vulnerable and open so that other people can see if you’re struggling.
When you look around and everyone seems to be living their best life 24/7, you feel like you have to put on a front.
“Stiff upper lip” syndrome means feelings like shame, loneliness and depression are stigmatized as if they shouldn’t ever be spoken about. That makes it even harder to get help if you go through a difficult experience in life. You put on a front and pretend as if your life is constantly fun, happy and glamorous. You’re never fully connecting, always trying to hide your feelings as if they’re an elephant in the room – everyone knows it’s there, but no one is brave enough to talk about it.
The longer you try to hide the elephant in the room, the bigger it gets, the worse it feels and the more difficult it is to address. Storytelling makes that a lot easier, because it acts as a connector without necessarily having to feel as exposed and scared to share your experiences. This method is rooted in traditional indigenous cultures of storytelling that have been creating connection for years, and helps people work with their emotions instead of “facing” them or “fighting” them. It’s a much more comfortable way to have uncomfortable conversations.
What’s your favorite part of the supper club?
The feeling people have when they come to a dinner. There’s nothing more meaningful than seeing the lightbulb moments people have when they listen to everyone else’s stories and realize that they’re not alone.
Most people are incredibly nervous and apprehensive, but they still come, and I think that’s really brave. That’s why the conversation cards we print through MOO are so important. They cut out awkward small talk moments and take the pressure off attendees, so they don’t have to try and think up things to say when they’re already quite nervous. One of the most beautiful things to witness is the way nervousness disappears throughout the evening and you see people who came as strangers leave feeling more like friends. People have described it as life-changing and I genuinely believe that it really is.
The coronavirus outbreak reinforced feelings of loneliness for isolated and marginalized people. How did you adapt your concept in a time of pandemic to address this?
Like many businesses and organizations planning events, we moved from in-person dinners to hosting events online. I created Elephants At Home – an online version of the Eating With Elephants dinner – to give people a chance to stay connected while apart during the pandemic.
The Eating With Elephants ethos is to create deep connections, so it’s always been important that our events and experiences are as tech-free as possible. I wanted to make sure that Elephants At Home had the same atmosphere, so I created some printed materials and connected with a meal delivery service to put together a storytelling supper club in a box. The box includes candles to create the same magical atmosphere we use at Eating With Elephants dinners, all the storytelling tools, plus a delicious meal and a cocktail or mocktail to enjoy at home. They’ve worked really well – better than I could have hoped for!
How did you approach your promotion strategy to attract a wider audience for Eating With Elephants?
Actually, I was really lucky. The pilot events went amazingly well, so I had a great start. The feedback was so good that it spread by word of mouth really quickly, which was great.
There’s only so much you can do on your own though, so my approach has always been to collaborate as much as possible. Two heads are definitely better than one! I joined a peer-learning accelerator called Enrol Yourself where I met a whole network of people who I’ve collaborated with in many different ways. I also used the accelerator as a platform to experiment, get feedback to keep adapting to what people wanted and connect to more people and organizations I could partner with. Partnering up means more opportunities, a wider audience and more support.
Partnering up means more opportunities, a wider audience and more support.
I had videos and photography done quite early on, which I’d really recommend. My visuals made it much easier for people to connect with the concept and get a good feel for what it’s like to actually be at a dinner. I built the website myself, so having high-quality photographs was a must – it makes a huge, huge difference. The photography clearly shows what we’re about, makes the site look professional and builds trust, which encourages people to book tickets to an event.
How do you use MOO to reach more people?
MOO has helped us reach far more people, firstly with the conversation cards we use at the events – they’re now also a key part of the Elephants At Home events. They’ve helped us reach people all over the world, to experience the magic of Eating With Elephants. It’s been an absolute godsend. The MOO items in the boxes include:
- A deck of conversation cards you can use to skip small talk and have a meaningful face to-face conversation, which actually makes you feel connected to the person you’re speaking to. They’re also pretty versatile, the questions on the cards can double up as daily journal prompts, for connecting with yourself, and a way of creating deeper connections with friends, family or even strangers.
- A conversation menu to list everything included in the event.
- Round labels for the products in the box.
- Mini stickers, which I use as “stamps” on Elephants Mail – letters that attendees write to their future selves, which I send to them on the date they want to receive it in the future. Those are my favorite.
Do you have any projects coming up you’d like to share with us?
Yes! Free storytelling circles. They’re a shorter, simpler, free version of Eating With Elephants that happen during the daytime as well. It’s a supportive, completely judgement-free environment to just tell stories and connect with other people at a time that can be really difficult – especially if you live alone.
Walking With Elephants, a 30-day walking challenge built for connection. A group of people take daily walks guided by daily prompts and tools designed to increase connection.
I’m launching a podcast, which I’m really excited about. It’s a series of on-to-one conversations based on the Eating With Elephants storytelling format. Every episode features real people talking about real stories and listening to what they’ve learned along the way is pretty life-changing. I can’t wait for people to hear it!
I run storytelling training for corporates and nonprofits to help them get to know and connect with their employees in a way that actually works. I’ll be running more of those, too.
I also run a fundraising campaign for Brainstrust with one of my closest friends. We were both diagnosed with the same brain tumor, so now we run a campaign to raise funds and awareness so the charity can help more people like us to live well with a brain tumor.
Working from home can create feelings of isolation. Any advice for remote workers and freelancers struggling with loneliness?
- Make time to get offline and go outside every day. I think it’s so important, especially now, when the places you’d usually go to mix up your routine aren’t open. When I start to feel a bit stir crazy, I go for a walk. Even if it’s just 15 for minutes, I feel so much calmer and more refreshed when I get back.
- Try and sleep well and stick to a regular routine. The more out of sync you are with everyone around you, the less time you’ll be able to spend connecting with them and, if you’re tired, that will leave you feeling even more lonely.
- Try joining freelancer support networks and online co-working groups. They’re brilliant. You’ll connect with people who get what you’re going through. All freelancers struggle with loneliness at some point, so they’ll know how you feel and have useful advice to share.
- Sign up to an Eating With Elephants event! OK, I’m biased with this one, but giving yourself time to make genuine, meaningful connections with people is really rewarding and one of the best things you can do to feel less lonely.
Reconnect and give your community a beautiful brand experience at home with MOO’s custom marketing materials.